Introduction

In my experience—with students, colleagues, friends, myself—I
find that most people view aesthetic objects and art objects (which
sometimes overlap but not always) through a variety of "lenses":
subjectively located, psychologically based perspectives or
"contexts" through which the object is viewed, considered,
appreciated, and many times even criticized. I believe that many
times the depth and richness of aesthetic reward depends on the
perspective through which the subject attends to an object or
event. While a part of aesthetic perspectival context is
objective—such as the physical conditions surrounding and history
concerning the aesthetic object—the majority of it is subjective,
and I want to take another step and say that the majority is
psychological.1 Aesthetic attenders bring to
aesthetic experiences thick sets of background beliefs, personal
associations, taste preferences, attitudes, and values—and this is
not to mention the more temporal items like how they feel on the
day or whether they are attending alongside friends, relatives, or
colleagues. Hundreds of psychological factors result in differences
in aesthetic experience; this is most likely true of all
experiences, but it is even more the case in aesthetic experience
and those kinds of experiences that set the occasions for attenders
to think, feel, consider, spend time with, introspect, and be in a
relationship—subject and object—that is distinct from the ordinary
and the routine.

Attenders can employ a single lens or multiple ones. It is
entirely possible to attend in the absence of the employment of any
lens—a purely disinterested or purely formalist perspective would
be such a thing—but the vast majority of aesthetic attenders bring
with them layers of lenses through which they naturally,
nontheoretically (which is not to say noncognitively) view objects.
On different occasions, given particular objects and particular
subjects, the subject may view an aesthetic object from an art
historical perspective (whether or not the object is an art
object); a moral perspective; a cultural, political, or national
perspective; a social, class, race, ethnic, or gender perspective;
a religious or spiritual point of view; an emotional point of view;
a point of view colored by personal associations, personal history,
personal identification, personal preference; and on and
on.2 Sometimes the employment of lenses is
distracting, and sometimes the experience is less than positive
given such employment. But (1) many times—I want to say most
times—the employment of such lenses results in a richer and more
meaningful experience, and (2) it is the natural stance. Adopting a
noncontextualized perspective requires conscious volitional effort.
Seeing through particular psychological lenses is the default.

I want to focus in this paper on a kind of perspective, a kind
of psychological context, that has not been much discussed: I will
call it aesthetic engagement preparation. Essentially,
this has to do with the level of readiness that the subject
possesses for engaging with particular objects aesthetically. To
engage in a way that will provide a good return on her investment
of attention, the subject must be open to the object, must be
comfortable with the objective context, must be ready to enter into
a relationship with the object—a relationship that may be
psychologically associational in all sorts of ways (affectively,
cognitively, and so forth)—and must be ready to employ a range of
lenses, like the ones described above, to get the most out of her
experience. Again, those who advocate noncontextualized
(disinterested or formalist) approaches—Shaftesbury, Hutcheson,
Addison, Kant, Schopenhauer, Wilde, Whistler, Wimsatt, Greenberg,
Brooks, Wolfflin, Bell, Moore, Bullough, Hanslick, Ortega y
Gassett, Fry, Hampshire, Stolnitz, and Zangwill, just to name a
few—will find aesthetic engagement preparation not only unnecessary
but counterproductive. However, given its efficacy for enhancing
actual aesthetic experience, I take this as a sign that these
noncontextualists may have been on the wrong path. But of course
this is an empirical question, and certainly there are cases—though
rare, I claim—where employment of aesthetic lenses results in a
less positive experience than otherwise.

What I will try to do in this paper is to demonstrate (1) the
scope of aesthetic engagement preparation on the nature and quality
of aesthetic experience, (2) how developing aesthetic engagement
preparation leads...

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